FAIR warning, we are starting this column with Mrs Thatcher.
“You see, Margaret wasn’t a classic Brexiteer,” former chancellor and home secretary Ken Clarke told James Naughtie on Reflections on Radio 4 on Wednesday morning. “I don’t know what side Margaret would have been on in the referendum. I think she might have been a Remainer.”
Now there’s a counterfactual history that needs to be written. Thatcher’s name, inevitably, came up a lot in Naughtie’s leisurely conversation with Clarke who remains entertaining company, even when you are shouting at the radio as he extols Thatcher once more.
It should be remembered he was also the first man to stick the knife in when she didn’t win the Tory leadership ballot outright in 1990.
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“It was a fascinating conversation, it was very tense,” Clarke recalled of his meeting with Thatcher when he told her had to go. “It was one of the most memorable meetings of my life. It was very sad, but the fact was she had lost her touch.”
Reflections, originally presented by historian Peter Hennessy, has long been a friendly platform for mostly retired politicians to wax long and lyrical about their time in power or near it. At times it can feel that everyone involved is having a conversation in their gentlemen’s club.
But it does provide a space for what the title promises. Here was Clarke reflecting on his political life from the days of Suez to Brexit, both events, you might argue, that have shown up Britain’s foolish self-regard.
And yes, there were a few well-honed lines offered up. On his recurrent bids to become Tory party leader, Clarke noted: “I always say it’s the only bad habit I’ve ever given up in my life, standing for leadership.”
As for more recent history, he didn’t have many kind words to say of Boris Johnson. “He wasn’t very interested in parliament,” Clarke said of Johnson. “The idea he was accountable to the courts or constitutional norms enraged him. We had reached the stage where the main people he was accountable to were the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph.”
Would Clarke have made a better fist of being PM? “I prefer to be sometimes referred to as one of the Prime Ministers we might have had,” he concluded. “It’s a very good club. Roy Jenkins. Michael Heseltine; a very distinguished club.
“And the great thing is, I always say, you never know how bad we would have been.”
On Tuesday morning Radio 4 gave us one of those very Radio 4 juxtapositions. A programme about sheep was followed up by a programme on the history of the Hollywood sign.
In The Trouble with Sheep Charlotte Smith asked the question where stands sheep farming these days? Nowhere good seemed to be the answer. Wool is now worth less than the cost of shearing.
But in passing Smith’s programme was a reminder of the importance of sheep in British history. It’s there in the place names, like Skipton, aka “Sheep Town”; it’s there in the Domesday Book, in which it is recorded that there were more sheep in the country than all other livestock combined back then; and it’s there in the churches built on money provided from wool merchants.
“The landscape of Britain, both architecturally and physically, has been shaped by sheep farming,” author Sally Coulthard pointed out to Smith.
Even now cows are probably lobbying the BBC for a right of reply.
As for the Hollywood sign, well, David Willis told us, it dates back to 1923 when it was put up as an advert to sell plots of land. The sign - then spelling out Hollywoodland - was meant to be erected for 18 months, but it stayed in place to become a symbol of a particular American dream. The odd nightmare too, as in 1932 when the actress Peg Entwistle jumped to her death in 1932 from top of the letter H.
That tragedy aside, Willis’s documentary was full of fun titbits. In 1947 there was a hippy health advocate called Eden Ahbez discovered living under the letter L. He was also the writer of the Nat King Cole hit song Nature Boy.
The sign has been regularly destroyed in the movies themselves in films as diverse as Earthquake, 1941 and Sharknado, but in 1978 the sign was in danger in the real world too.
“The sign was basically falling off the mountain,” Alice Cooper pointed out. The singer and a number of other celebrities including Andy Williams and Hugh Hefner sponsored letters to bring it back to its former glory.
Cooper himself paid for an O.
Listen Out For: Marriage Lines, Radio 4 Extra, Friday, 8am, 1pm, 6pm
Marriage Lines was originally a 1960s TV sitcom starring Prunella Scales and Richard Briers, but in 1965 it was transferred to radio and Radio 4 Extra is repeating the result.
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